Saturday, 29 May 2010

Interested to see that Bishop Pat Buckley has expanded his ministry in Ireland and beyond. He has a fascinating new website for the new “Celtic Catholic Society.”

New organisations like this do not appear lightly or without a great deal of heart searching. Another ‘prophetic’ community has begun to live a vision of how the church could be. I thank God for them and wish them growth. Have a look by clicking here or on the picture above.

Friday, 14 May 2010

Thought this post from Bishop Timothy Dolan of the Diocese of New York might be of interest, especially considering how much we have the capacity to disfigure the Divine in ourselves and in each other

Our Lady of Nagasaki

Haunting … that’s the only word I can find to describe it …

Last week I welcomed the Archbishop of Nagasaki, the Most Reverend Joseph Mitsuaki. He pleaded at the United Nations for an end to all nuclear weapons. Lord knows he has immense credibility: he is now the pastor of the tiny Catholic flock of a Japanese city where 75,000 people were reduced to ash by a single atomic blast on August 9, 1945. On that day, Joseph was still a baby in his mother’s womb, and only survived because she was far enough away from ground-zero.

And something else survived: the head of the statue of Mary Immaculate in the parish church in Urakami, a village right aside Nagasaki. It was this skull of Mary that the archbishop brought with him to the U.N. and to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

And it is this head that is haunting: she is scarred, singed badly, and her crystal eyes were melted by the hellish blast. So, all that remains are two empty, blackened sockets.

I’ve knelt before many images of the Mother of Jesus before: our Mother of Perpetual Help, the Pieta, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Lourdes, just to name a few.

But I’ve never experienced the dread and revulsion I did when the archbishop showed us the head of Our Lady of Nagasaki …It’s May, the month we traditionally devote to her, our blessed Mother.

She absorbs our sorrows, our worries, our sickness, our fears, like any good mother would. She brings them — and us — to the only one who can do anything about them: Jesus.

At Nagasaki, she absorbed the radiation, incinerating heat, the suffering of her children.

Sunday, 2 May 2010

I'm never quite sure how I miss groups like corpus as I search the internet for christians in the 'catholic' tradition.

This site is a superb resource and witness to the many people who feel called to a sacramental ministry but are restricted from doing so in the Roman catholic tradition, purely because of tradition with a little 't.' Let's see more groups like this in the world, exploring new ways of being a sacramental community, through a spirituality generous enough to allow God's presence to shine in the heart of all.

Saturday, 1 May 2010

Joachim of Flores in the 13th century saw three stages in the development of God's church. The first was the Church of obedience to the Father, the Church of Israel; the second was the Church of the Son, Jesus, which he identified with the hierarchical Catholic church. He prophesied that there would come the day when the hierarchical church, becoming superfluous, would in time dissolve and in its place would emerge the Church of the Holy Spirit. I believe that time is now.

Ministry in the Church of the Holy Spirit will come from a direct call of the Holy Spirit to any baptized person from within their spiritual self-awareness. The task of authority will be to listen prayerfully to what the Holy Spirit is saying through the people of God. All authority will proceed from the bottom up and not from the top down. Every community should prayerfully discern spirits to select among their members the one whom God is calling to leadership. That individual could be a man or woman, married or single, gay or straight! The Church of the Holy Spirit must become a totally democratic church with no caste system, no higher or lower, totally equal, women with men, gays with straights; everyone possessing the Holy Spirit within them; everyone an authority.